Some friends and I went to the Utah Asian Festival in Sandy, UT. It gave me a chance to practice some event photography, which is certainly challenging because one often only has one chance to capture a moment.
Most of the beginning photos were crap because of too much motion blur or too out of focus. These were still issues the whole time, but I got better as the festival progressed. Unfortunately, we had to leave early so we missed many of the more modern performances.
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| The first scheduled performance was a runway show of children and adults showing off traditional wear from various Asian countries. |
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| Next was a Chinese Lion Parade demonstration. |
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| It's said that if you feed a lion money, good luck will come to you. |
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| This was one of the guest speakers that helped introduce the stage acts in the festival. |
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| This talented singer sang the national anthem and a few other songs to help kick off the festival. |
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| One of the first performances was a traditional Chinese long-sleeve dance. |
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| Next was an Indian folk dance, which was quite engaging. |
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| Next was a solo dance performance of a ballet-style Chinese dance. |
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| This was a South Korean folk dance performed in traditional dresses. |
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| Coming from Thailand, some kids performed a traditional folk dance with flowers. The song used made me realize that Thai isn't really a beautiful language to listen to, but is nonetheless important in Asian culture. |
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| Some Thai women later performed a more elaborately-choreographed dance. |
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| Another co-host arrived to help introduce the festival acts. Her homemade Iranian flag dress was beautiful, and it was nice to see West Asian representation in addition to East and South Asian. |
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| There was also a decent Polynesian presence, with Filipino, Hawaiian and Tahitian performances. |
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| This solo folk performance came from Indonesia. I loved the peacock outfit. |
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| One of the last performances we saw was a sitar demonstration; the microphone setup was unforunately subpar, and the sound got a bit drowned out from drumming happening on the other side of the convention center. |
